Why Do People Buy A House?
The science of sales is a mysterious one. Why people buy - and therefore how to help them decide to buy - is the Holy Grail of business. Every year a lot of new paperbacks show up on the New York Times Bestseller List purporting to instruct the eager salesperson in how to separate the customer from his money while still maintaining a good relationship. But it is such a subjective topic that aspiring business leaders do not actually learn about it in school. You learn about margin, and the relationship between price and sales volume, and you study supply and demand, but Porter and Christensen never impart to you any wisdom about how to go out and make it happen in sales. Or if they do, B-schools haven't deemed the fundamentals solid enough to put it in the curriculum.
? This is probably why managers pay successful salespeople so handsomely. The failure rate even of experienced salespeople in a performance-intensive real estate role can easily be as high as 9 out of 10. And anyone who can walk into such a challenging position and consistently make it rain can command a salary that makes C-level officers sit up and take notice. Because I'll tell you the dirty little secret of sales: wait for it, here it is [rim shot]: "We Don't Really Know Why People Buy A House..."
We know what prompts them to buy, which can simply be summed up as dissatisfaction. Living with your parents isn't working for you anymore, raising 3 kids in the 2-bedroom apartment is making you crazy, with both your busy schedules you don't have time to cut the grass or paint the fences, you stopped taking stairs two-at-a-time 23 years ago and the one-level ranch is looking better and better, you are entertaining more now and can't fit all your friends into that 1200 square foot condo; there are many different situations that prompt people to buy. But that's not always why they buy. Folks often stay in conditions that are less than ideal for many years before they sit at my table and ink a contract.
We also know when they typically buy. Things start getting green in spring and the young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, and the young woman's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of granite countertops and white kitchen cabinets. Halfway through August everyone realizes they have to have their kids in the school district of their choice and they all call at once to stake out their claim before someone else beats them out. June is probably the top month, with some interesting spikes around the holidays. But I have worked with a great many people who were out looking when the time seemed to be right, but still decided not to buy.
Good managers work hard to analyze patterns, looking at contracts written by subdivision and product and trying to correlate them to some predictable factor such as marketing strategy or product offering that could be replicated in the future. But my boss who has been doing this for four decades will tell you that he still does not know why a salesperson gets on a roll and sells 9 houses in a couple of months, and another equally talented salesperson works their tail off with qualified prospects and comes up with absolutely nothing.
At the end of the day, trying to figure out why the young woman signed the purchase contract for the Uba Tuba granite and the white cabinets is like trying to calculate why the young man took a fancy to her instead of someone else. People are human beings, and there isn't always a logical reason for why they decide to do things. It was a pretty day; he just got a bonus at work; she just got a promotion; they had an awesome date last night; the salesperson wasn't pushy and let them go at their own pace; it just felt right inside; and they decided to buy a house. Good luck feeding all those criteria into a predictive analysis data model! But a good salesperson knows that earning people's trust and being there at the moment when (for whatever reason) they decide to buy a house is what will make her successful time after time, and will make her customers' homeownership dreams come true.
Jeremy D. Vogan
(540) 487-0480 | [email protected] | Sales Representative, Countryside HomeCrafters LC (Equal Opportunity Housing provider)
Photo credit: www.realestatetraralgon.wordpress.com